Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

56 • The Making of Islamic Sciencethe world, with various localities placed on grids. This was an art thatrequired the knowledge of sophisticated mathematics and geometry.The discovery of two such world maps for finding the direction anddistance to Makkah has helped to push the date of the decline ofscience in Islamic civilization well beyond initial estimates. These twomaps are engraved on a circular plate and are believed to have beenmade in the middle of the second half of the seventeenth century(King 1999, 199).Astronomical time-keeping also led to the development of miqattables computed on the basis of the coordinates of a given locality.One of the earliest miqat tables is attributed to Ibn Yunus (d. 1009),whose work provided the basis of numerous subsequent tables thatwere used in Cairo until the nineteenth century (Samsó 2001, 212).By the middle of the twelfth century, most cities had official miqattables and, in certain big cities, a special official had been appointedfor this purpose. Ibn al-Shatir (d. 1375) is said to have held this officein Damascus. The third standard problem of miqat, the predictionof crescent visibility, which determined the beginning of a newIslamic month, received focused attention of Muslim astronomersthroughout the period under consideration and remains an areaof special interest even now. We have an inside narrative from oneof the most celebrated Muslim astronomers that testifies to theseabiding concerns of Islamic astronomy. This is in the form of a letterby Ghiyath al-Din Jamshid Mas‘ud al-Kashi to his father, written a fewweeks after his arrival in Samarqand to take part in the constructionof a new observatory. This letter, fortunately preserved for posterityby his father, is also an intimate source of rich details on the natureof science in the Islamic civilization in the fifteenth century—a timeonce considered to be barren!Al-Kashi begins his letter by thanking God for his many favorsand blessings, then apologizes to his father for not writing earlier.He speaks of his preoccupation with the observatory and tells himhow he had been received by Ulugh Beg, a ruler whom he describesas extremely well-educated in the QurāĀn, Arabic grammar, logic,and the mathematical sciences. He relates an anecdote about UlughBeg, that one day, while on horseback, he computed a solar positioncorrect to the minutes of an arc. He then tells his father that upon